Current News

Linda Tropp will be one of five panelists on the upcoming seminar, "Where We Stand and What We See", hosted by the Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR). The seminar will address the following questions: in what ways does our social position affect the academic work that we do? Does one’s position in society produce "epistemic advantages," allowing someone to see things that others cannot? If there is, what can social science do to accommodate such things? What do such issues imply about the possibility of knowledge in social science?

The panel brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines to discuss whether and how "where we stand" affects "what we see" and "what we can know" as scholars. The seminar is scheduled on Thursday, November 29, 2018 from 4:00pm to 5:30pm and will be located in E20 Machmer Hall, UMass Amherst. Click here for more information.

What is it about a college degree — especially when filtered by race and gender — that so starkly correlates with political beliefs? In the social sciences, a college degree is more than just a piece of paper, said Tatishe M. Nteta, an associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. It’s an indicator of a set of networks and worldviews provided by the campus and classroom experience. “People who have a college degree tend to be friends with, tend to work with, tend to live in neighborhoods with individuals who also have college degrees,” Nteta said. In a recent paper, Nteta and his colleagues studied voter samples from the 2016 election to analyze what had driven the so-called education gap among white voters.Read more here.

The intervention, “Promoting Community Conversations About Research to End Suicide” (PC CARES) was developed by Lisa Wexler and Cris Smith at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with colleagues from Northwest Alaska and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Wexler and colleagues pilot-tested the program in 10 far-flung Native Alaska communities over the past year. They recently received a five-year, $3.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health to expand the project, “re-envisioning it to adapt to a new region,” as she explains. Read more here.

Reducing Depression and Stress in Low-income New Mothers and their Partners

CRF Director, Dr. Maureen Perry-Jenkins, has launched an exciting and innovative pilot project that aims to reduce depression and stress among low-income new mothers and their partners early in pregnancy. “We’ve always known that stress can have negative impacts on our health, but the latest literature is really showing that stress prenatally is very detrimental in terms of long-term health of both mothers and infants. Thus, the aim of our intervention is to reduce stress in the second trimester of pregnancy to enhance parental well-being and child outcomes,” she explains.

CRF is a co-sponsor for the upcoming 2018 Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series, "Domestic Workers Building Dignity and Power, Past and Present"

Thursday, November 1, 5:30 pm
Bernie Dallas Room, Goodell Hall

Domestic workers are organizing on a massive scale to build economies that respect the labor of women of color. This panel of organizers and historians will discuss the goals and challenges facing the domestic workers' movement. Panelists will explore how the rich history of domestic worker organizing can inform present-day struggles for dignity and respect, and inform the creation of alternative feminist economies that respect the labor of women of color. Click here for more information about the event.

Agnès Lacreuse received $361,752 in supplemental funding from NIH to study whether Alzheimer's disease-like symptoms occur naturally in nonhuman primates with aging. Agnès Lacreuse is especially interested in determining whether female marmosets, like women, are more prone to such symptoms, and her work seeks to identify the factors that predict pathological aging in each sex. Read more here.

Linda Tropp has been selected as a recipient of the 2018 Scientific Impact Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP), which “honors the author(s) of a specific article or chapter offering a theoretical, empirical, and/or methodological contribution that has proven highly influential over the last 25 years.” Tropp and her group of researchers spent over five years “trying to find every study on intergroup contact we could,” she says. Tropp mined more than 500 studies gathered from the 1940s through the year 2000, which together include more than 250,000 participants from 38 countries, to conduct a “meta-analysis,” a type of research study “where you try to find every study ever done on a particular topic, and then using statistical methods, you combine the results from those studies to see what they show overall,” she explains. Read more here.

In the Fall of 2017, CRF partnered with the Children's Trust to offer an innovative, 3-credit course that brought together UMass undergraduates and Healthy Families' home visitors. There is mounting evidence that post-secondary education and specialized training in child development better prepares the early childhood workforce. The class, Risk and Resilience in the Lives of First-Time, Young Parents was recently highlighted as one of only two credit-earning options for home visitors nationwide in a recent article in ChildTrends. Read more here.

Rebecca Spencer was recently featured on Connecting Point to discuss her current studies on the importance of sleep for older adults as it relates to memory and how overnight sleep and naps affect preschool age children. Watch the video here.